Cover Art: Sizes, Formats, and How to Store It Properly

Two ways to store artwork

Album art can be stored in two ways, and each is useful for something different.

• Embedded — the image lives inside the music file itself, as part of its metadata. It travels wherever the file goes.
• Separate — an ordinary image file in the album folder, usually named cover.jpg or folder.jpg. Most desktop applications read it.

The practical advice: do both. Embedded art guarantees the cover follows the file onto your phone; the separate file survives even when the file's metadata gets damaged, and it does not multiply in size across every track.

Why large sizes work against you

Here is the arithmetic most people never do.

Embedded art is stored in every single file. A 12-track album with a 3 MB cover means 36 MB spent on the same image, repeated twelve times.

Multiply that across 60 albums and you have burned more than 2 GB on duplicate images — while your music app displays them at roughly 500 pixels on screen.

There is a second cost that you actually feel: files with enormous embedded art open more slowly, especially on portable players that reload the image every time you skip a track.

Sizes that make sense

• 500×500 pixels — enough for almost every player and phone
• 600×600 pixels — the safe default for most people
• 1000×1000 pixels — if you use a large display or want a higher-quality archive
• Above 1500 pixels — almost always overkill for embedded art

For the separate file in the album folder, larger sizes are easier to justify: it is stored once per album, not once per track. There, 1500 pixels is reasonable.

JPEG or PNG?

For album art, almost always JPEG.

PNG wins on images with sharp lines, text, or flat blocks of colour — logos and screenshots. Album covers are photographs or rich illustrations, and for those JPEG produces a far smaller file with a difference your eye cannot find.

A rough comparison: a 600×600 cover as PNG might be 800 KB; as JPEG at quality 85, around 80 KB. Ten times smaller, visually identical.

The exception: if the cover really is graphic design with crisp text and solid colour blocks, PNG can be the better choice.

Common mistakes

• Different covers within one album. This happens when each track gets its own artwork from a different source. The album then looks fragmented in your music app.
• Artwork from the wrong release. Vinyl editions, Japanese editions, and remasters often carry different covers. Use the one matching the release you actually own.
• Non-square images. Most players assume a 1:1 ratio and will crop or stretch anything else.
• Crooked scans. A digital source beats a skewed, blurry photo of a physical sleeve every time.

How EarTea handles it

EarTea pulls artwork from the Cover Art Archive — the official archive linked to MusicBrainz — so the image matches the release you actually own, not just any album with a similar title.

You see a preview and choose the size before anything is written, so no 3000-pixel image slips into your files without you noticing.